The Woods – Season 1 Episode 5 Recap & Review

Your Sister Is Dead

Episode 5 of The Woods begins with Pawel trying to get to the bottom of his sister-in-law’s arrest, phoning Kuba and leaving a voicemail, revealing he thinks he knows who’s doing this – Dunaj-Szafranski. Leon and Laura meanwhile, watch the scenes unfold on TV as Leon comments that there’s nothing they can do to help.

Back in 1994, Pawel’s father heads out to the woods in the middle of the night and starts digging. Pawel happens to be watching from afar though and as he leaves, he tells Pawel not to follow.

In 2019, Pawel’s boss decides to ignore the complaint against him, allowing Pawel to breathe easy for now. Only, when he heads back to his desk he notices an article regarding warnings about Wojtek. This brings flashes of the past with it, as Pawel relives the painful moments his Father revealed to him that his Mother ran away.

At the same time, Lubelski starts to interrogate Wojtek, trying in vain to get a confession from him. It turns out he’s in prison and as we cut to 2019, Pawel heads in to visit. Wojtek talks about Kamila and her affection for Daniel and it turns out he also received a visit recently, this time from a private investigator called Karol. When asked, Wojtek vehemently declines involvement in killing the kids. Eventually Pawel loses his temper and slams the phone down, telling him he’ll find Kamila no matter what.

Pawel meets Kuba and learns that Malgorzata’s issues lead all the way back to Ming Li. Cursing his luck, he marches back to the restaurant but it turns out she no longer works there. Back at the station, Bogdan arrives and sits with Pawel, discussing the possibility that Artur faked his own death and then killed the other three in the woods. Believing Bogdan may know something, the old man finally admits that Artur wasn’t the only one to leave those woods alive – hinting that Kamila is still alive too.

On the back of this revelation, Laura warns that Bogdan may just be telling him exactly what he wants to hear. After handing over a hotel room key, Laura takes her leave as Kaja sits with her Father.

The forensic team continue working but as they comb through the different bones something doesn’t add up. In Pawel’s office, the scientist talks about the bone structure and reveals that whoever it was – they were strangled to death. The bones also don’t belong to a small girl either, they actually belong to a woman in her 40’s.

Jork contemplates his next move too but refuses to believe Pawel is the one responsible – someone is clearly trying to frame him. As he keeps digging, Jork finds evidence surrounding Marek’s body including fibers from an old 70’s model car seat.

Pawel combs through CCTV footage from the car scrapyard and notices someone stop and drop off a body – the body of Marek. Feeding this back to Jork, he promises to look into it and thanks Pawel for his help. Only, when Pawel returns to the car park he finds his tyres have been slashed.

Laura picks him up and drops him off with Dawid in the woods, but not before he tells her he loves her. As they look at each other, she eventually drives off while Pawel questions Dawid over what he knows. Confronting him over Artur and Kamila still being alive, he acts confused and dumbfounded over what Pawel is suggesting.

Meanwhile, Jork does a check on the car from the scrapyard and it turns out they can trace the owner – Dawid. As the two officers rush to the nursing home, Dawid and Pawel get talking, where the former admits that Wojtek and Dawid were both in the woods that night, engaging in oral sex together.

Pawel’s repressed memories start to come back, including moments where Dawid threatened Pawel to keep quiet or risk him and his Mother being killed. As Pawel presses harder in the present, turning the attention to Kamila and whether she’s still alive, Dawid loses his composure and tells Pawel to keep the dead buried and to be quiet. Eventually Dawid brandishes a gun and shoots Pawel in the stomach. As he doubles over, Laura arrives and sees the carnage first-hand, pleading with her Father to stop. “Your sister is dead,” He says before turning the gun on himself and pulling the trigger.

What a dramatic twist at the end! With the big reveal that Dawid was the one who killed Marek and lots of focus on the summer camp issues, the present day drama surrounding Pawel’s sister-in-law and the public embezzlement continues to feel like the weak link in all this.

While some of this is linked to the past, a lot of it feels like it’s running parallel to the investigation and it just doesn’t have that same allure the mystery does. Still, there’s enough here to enjoy though and the stage is certainly set for quite the dramatic finale to come.